East End Film Festival returns this summer, with the much-loved event taking control of venues across the capital between July 1st – 12th.
As usual, it's more than just a few film screenings. A series of immersive, engrossing events await, with East End Film Festival increasing its scope year on year.
Fresh from the release of new studio album 'Dumb Flesh', Blanck Mass – real name Benjamin John Power – has agreed to take part in a new project for the event.
East End Film Festival will assist on the vinyl release and film premiere of the newly commissioned re-score soundtrack to 'The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears'.
Curated by Blanck Mass, it's an extremely unusual project which will air for the first time at London's Red Gallery on July 10th. Here's Ben to explain more…
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Although I am yet to score a movie, the idea of the 'film-score' is something that has resonated throughout my entire back catalogue to date. A strong sense of narrative is prominent in every album I have made, with the ebb and flow between tracks being just as important to me as the formation of the individual tracks themselves.
It's for this reason that soundtrack work excites me so much. I see the process as being very much related, though, perhaps a complete mirror image. Whereas previously I have worked on 'music to paint a picture' a film-score exists to further express and sometimes even dramatically shift an existing picture.
When I initially spoke to my friends at the East End Film Festival about collaborating on something for this year's event, the brief was very loose and there was discussion of Blanck Mass working on a new live score for the chosen film 'The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears' and performing it as a one-off live event at the festival. I felt this idea had been particularly 'overdone' and devised the idea of curating a collaborative soundtrack, including myself and several other 'like-minded' musicians/sound-designers from around the world, operating primarily with electronics and noise.
The concept was to see how each of these different minds envisaged a similar space and how they chose to fill it. The project was laid out like a game of 'exquisite corpse'. I chose a 15 or so minute scene for each contributing artist and allowed them to have complete free reign within their space. No artist had any idea of what their neighbour had planned and did not discuss.
What amazed me was the coherency of the final outcome and how beautifully each artists section sat with the next. The project produced a soundtrack which, whilst in its diversity of tools and ideas, was very much part of an accomplished whole. Sometimes jarring (often the way with horror soundtrack) but strangely coherent. It was amazing to see how the stage had effectively brought artists minds to a similar place and made a very global connection.
I felt it would be an injustice to not have this soundtrack see a physical release. Spencer at Death Waltz caught wind of the project and was onboard. This was a wonderful project to orchestrate and I thank everyone involved for their patience and their vision.
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Blanck Mass x East End Film Festival soundtrack launch of 'The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears' re-score screening takes place at the Red Gallery, July 10th as part of the East End Film Festival – further details www.eastendfilmfestival.com
Soundtrack released on vinyl, CD and digital by Death Waltz on July 24th.
